The Unbelievably Sweet Story of How the "Cake Boss" Fell in Love

You're going to want to steal his tip for keeping the family together.

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GettyJim Spellman

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By Sarah Weinberg

Nov 3, 2017

If you ask Buddy Valastro — better known as the Cake Boss — and his wife Lisa who made the first move, you might find yourself in the middle of a he said, she said battle. This much is clear: The two met through family. Lisa's best friend was Buddy's second cousin and his neighbor, too. The two girls would watch Buddy and his friends from the bedroom window. "I used to look at Lisa like a little girl," Buddy laughed in an interview with TLC.

But years later, the two wound up at a club together, at the behest of Buddy's cousins. All grown up — she was 19; he was 22 — they decided to give dating a go. "When Lisa came out that night, I teased her and said 'you were really after me,' and she says I was really after her," Buddy revealed. Not that any of it matters anymore, though.

The two were inseparable from that day forward, Lisa said. During the early days of their relationship, when Buddy would be at the bakery late, Lisa would bring date nights to him. "She would bring me food," Buddy said. "We'd have a little dinner, then she'd just hang out and watch me decorate." Two years later, they were married — and less than a decade after that, Buddy had a show, and the couple had three kids. Their fourth was born shortly after, in 2011.

Buddy's rise to worldwide stardom hasn't been without the occasional hiccup. "When we got married, it was just us. Every night, he'd come home and we'd talk," Lisa said in an interview. "Now I share him with millions of people. That's the stressful part of it." But Buddy has an easy solution for bringing everyone together when he is home, one he learned from his father when he was a child.

"Every night, we have dinner as a family. We sit down and we talk and we eat," he told interviewers. It's food that brings the family together, he noted. And while his pastries and cakes are known far and wide, Lisa's eggplant Parmesan is famous in the Valastro household. "Those meals, that family time, are times we'll never forget," he continued.